12 May 2019

Christ in disguise

The Southern Cross newspaper – May 2019

Train loads of events fill our daily lives. If we don’t reflect on our experiences, we will never pick out what our experience of the major events is telling us, how the finger of God is tracing its patterns through our lives. So what has our experience of the major Seasons of Lent and Easter taught us?

27 Apr 2019

Ordination to the Diaconate of Pat Lopresti

Homily - April 27 2019

Dear Pat, my brother, in this holy Season, your baptismal name of Pasquale, the Pascha, Easter, is so appropriate, especially as upon the sacrament of your baptism you now in this time of Easter add to it the sacrament of ordination to Holy Orders. I welcome your family, your father Domenico and Rita, and your sister Rita. I welcome your friends and fellow seminarians to a sacred event that is charged with significance for you in the story of your life. I welcome all here present. Patrick, the word of election, the word of choice by the Church, was uttered over you in the last few minutes. The people affirmed the choice with their applause. Note that it is the Church which calls you forth, it is the Church which takes the initiative here, and you are called out by and for the Church. You are being called forth from among the people of God to proceed to Holy Orders. In a few minutes you will prostrate yourself on the floor of this Cathedral as a host of Saints is invoked on your behalf, Saints from all the traditions of the Church. And there will be the great threefold prayer sung by the people:

17 Apr 2019

Easter message from Bishop Greg O'Kelly SJ

The world has been riveted by the sight of Notre Dame Cathedral burning in Paris. It is the greatest symbol the French have, and has been with them for almost nine centuries. The timbers had the marks of medieval saws and hammers. There was modern IT and closed circuit television as well, wizardry of modern technology cheek by jowl with handcrafted ancient artistry.

It was a Cathedral that spanned the ages, so much of it was reduced to ashes. It will be built again, rising from the destruction.

18 Mar 2019

Letter from Bishop Greg O’Kelly SJ, Apostolic Administrator

Dear Brothers & Sisters

Along with all right thinking and feeling people, the Catholic communities of South Australia wish to express to our Muslim brothers and sisters our own feelings of distress and horror at the murder of the Muslim people in the Christchurch mosques. That such tragedies could be enacted in the midst of a society so similar to our own, and so close to ourselves, or indeed in any society, is alarming and horrifying.

06 Mar 2019

Pastoral Letter for the Season of Lent 2019

On Ash Wednesday one year ago a school shooting massacre occurred at the Parkland High School in Florida, resulting in seventeen deaths and a large number of wounded. Displayed prominently was a photo of anguished mothers arriving at the school to find out whether or not their child was a victim. One mother hugs another, and on her forehead is traced very visibly the cross she had received at an Ash Wednesday ceremony. “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes” was a refrain she heard that morning and would never have guessed how tragedy might visit her so starkly and so soon.

01 Mar 2019

Life is a gift that God gives forever

The Southern Cross newspaper – March 2019

Pope Francis has asked us to look at life issues in a holistic way, as a total perspective. It comes out of Our Lord’s words: ‘I have come that you may have life and have it to the full’. Pope Francis says that the Christian attitude to life must embrace everything from conception to natural death. And so it covers actions like abortion; it covers actions like capital punishment. It’s odd to be opposed to abortion and yet support capital punishment; there’s a contradiction there.

This Christian overall outlook on this issue also includes in its scope the poor and the vulnerable – those who haven’t got enough in order to have a proper human life. The Christian attitude to life also covers the environment, the Pope says, because we must not destroy that which gives us life. It covers the end of life as in the need for palliative care rather than euthanasia. This is the Christian attitude to all of life – we just don’t isolate abortion and speak about it by itself. It’s part of a whole framework of how the Christian regards life as a gift of God. As Saint Pope John Paul II said: ‘Life is a gift that God gives forever’.

28 Feb 2019

Letter from Bishop O'Kelly to the faithful

February 28 2019

Dear Brothers & Sisters

Everyone carrying the name of Catholic must feel bowed down with some sense of shame and even anger at what the crimes of clergy and Church personnel has wreaked upon us as a community. The strength of the media coverage these days reflects a rightful anger on the part of the wider community at the betrayal which such crimes represent, and the hypocrisy they reveal. It is wider than simply the case of Cardinal Pell, and no judgement should be made there until the result of the appeal. Greater than our pain, of course, is the suffering the victims of abuse have been enduring for many years. To continue to do whatever we can to ensure that such crimes do not repeat themselves, and to do whatever we can to help victims and to purify the Church must be a prime response.

07 Feb 2019

Concerning the proposed amendments to the abortion law – South Australia

February 7 2019

Circular to Clergy and Personnel – Diocese of Port Pirie; Archdiocese of Adelaide

Dear Brothers & Sisters

Concerning the Proposed Amendments to the Abortion Law – South Australia

In December last year Tammy Franks, of the Greens, proposed amendments to the present laws governing abortion in South Australia. If enacted the amendments could have far reaching consequences, and legitimise a significantly expanded practice of abortion. The next reading of the proposed Bill takes place at the end of this month.

18 Dec 2018

Christmas Message

The light of Christ outshines any darkness

Reflect how much we need the annual feast of Christmas. It comes and acts like a recharging of the soul. There is so much that can get us down but the annual reminder through the beauty of the Church’s Scriptures and liturgy that God so loved us, no matter how unworthy we might appear to be, that He sent his only Son, gives us again our focus.

Here is a great mystery. In contemplating us, God in some way sees his own image, as He has made us in his likeness, as Scripture says. Nothing can take that away from us. Christmas is the feast of the greatest affirmation of any of us.

Pope Francis has some beautiful reflections on Christmas. He asked one Christmas Eve “on this Holy Night, while we contemplate the infant Jesus just born and placed in the manger, we are invited to reflect: How do I welcome the tenderness of God… the question put to us simply by the Infant’s presence is: Do I allow God to love me?...” Francis then asks us whether we have the courage to also welcome with tenderness those near us who are different. How do we show to those others the warmth of God?

We are told that there are 12 abortions a day in South Australia. What a year full of misery and killing that adds up to. We have celebrated 100 years since the end of World War I, the war to end all wars. What was there to celebrate? Twenty-one years later we were at it again with World War II. How long has it taken to budge the hearts of our politicians over the children on Nauru?

But against all this we must place the tenderness of God, and what the Pope calls His cascade of mercy – born in a family, just as we were, nurtured by the love of parents, growing up with neighbours and relatives, God so affirmed us in that first Christmas through the birth of his Son that we must never lose confidence in the ability of good to triumph, for the light of Christ outshines any darkness, public or personal. The Word was made flesh, ‘and pitched His tent amongst us’, as Scripture says. Because God sees Godself in us and in the newborn Jesus we are all gifted beyond compare.